13.30. We'll probably wrap it up there for today. Thank you for reading.

13.20 Another chart from GIST - Britain's welfare bill. This morning the High Court ruled the so-called 'bedroom tax' is legal and threw out a claim it was discriminatory against disabled people.

This is annually managed expenditure for the Department of Work and Pensions in the first quarter of 2012-13 - showing the state pension, housing benefits, unemployment benefit and disability benefits.

12.54 In the comments, many of you say the data is too vague to reveal much of interest. The Taxpayers' Alliance have totted up the sections marked 'other' by type of transaction across all departments for 2012/13. It comes to £97,149,270,474.

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12.25 You'll see much of the data is divided into DEL and AME. Phil emails: "Please can you explain what "AME" and "DEL" mean? What is the point of having these data visualisations when the acronyms are not explained?"

It's a good question because the difference between the obstensibly quite dull accounting terms of Departmental Expenditure Limits and Annually Managed Expenditure is starting to keep Ministers awake at night.

Government spending is now described with two broad categories. Departmental Expenditure Limits are the firmly set annual budgets for each department, taking in salaries, building costs, administration and so on. DEL traditionally takes the brunt of cuts in spending reviews because it is relatively simple to control - staff can be laid off, building projects cancelled, luxury-away days banned, and so on.

Annually Manage Expenditure are unpredictable costs such as unemployment and sickness benefits, debt interest and pensions for a rapidly ageing population. They are much harder to control, and they go up in the weak economy because more people claim jobseekers allowance and the national debt grows.

At the moment, AME and DEL account for roughly equal amounts of national spending. But DEL is on a downwards trajectory, while AME is going up. For the first time, AME is now set to be the larger part of public spending.

To get public spending under control, you either have to cut harder into departmental budgets and make some serious decisions about how many diplomats and economists the Government can get away with losing - or take on the politically difficult issues of curbing welfare and benefits for pensioners.

12.20 The Cabinet Office gets in touch. EU payments are not included because GIST reflects departmental spending, rather than central items that are not incurred by a single department. The same presumably applies for the interest on the debt.

They stress GIST is a work in progress - and they are closely following your feedback in the comments below.

11.52 The Taxpayers' Alliance, who have been hunting down wasteful spending with zeal for nearly a decade, think GIST is living up to its billing in laying open the Government books.

Which beg a lot of questions - who were these written-off loans going to, and under what circumstances were they agreed? Who owes the DWP money that will never be paid back? Who were these vast corporations getting taxpayer hand-outs, and what had they done to earn them?

11.48Conrad Quilty-Harper, the Telegraph's Interactive News Editor, is not thrilled.

GIST stands for "Government Interrogating Spending Tool", but you won't be doing much interrogating with the tool since the datasets are so limited. The Cabinet Office collects hundreds of different datasets which are comparable bydepartment from the accessibility of buildings to total identified fraud. So why limit this website to broad spending categories which we already had easy access to in spreadsheet format? Hopefully the Cabinet Office will keep building the site and adding datasets so it becomes a genuinely useful tool for the public, because at the moment it's not useful at all.

11.35 Another sizeable omission - where are Britain's payments to the EU? The Treasury will send £14.7bn to Brussels this year. It doesn't appear to be under the Treasury's tab, or indeed anywhere on GIST. Do drop me an email if you find the cash on GIST - matthew.holehouse@Telegraph.co.uk

11.15 Jonathan Gray, of the Open Knowledge Foundation, is pleased to see the Cabinet Office unveil tools like this - but takes issue with claim that it is the "first of its kind." There have been similar projects by campaignersfor several years.

He emails: "We welcome the fact that the data from Project Oscar is now released and that it is significantly easier to use and explore than the previous releases of COINS data. But we wish that the government acknowledged the extent to which today's release builds on years of work from those inside and outside government."

The national debt stands at £1,189bn and is going northwards, quickly, and is expected to peak in 2017 at £1,638 billion. Interest payments on that debt will cost Britain £46.5bn. Within a few years, merely paying the interest on Britain's debt will cost more than the combined Education and Home Office budgets. But there's no sign of this collosal sum in GIST.

10.10 So let's take one of those departments - Health - and see what GIST can tell us about Q4 2012.

The top level shows how £27.9bn of spending is divided between the Department of Health, Foundation Trusts, NHS trusts and a series of quangos such as the Human Tissue Authority, the Health Protection Agency and so on.

Within the Department of Health section - £12bn - spending is divided into DEL, non-budget and AME. DEL is spending within the department's budget, such as wages and new hospital kit. AME is spending the department manages. That's largely made up of 'take up of provision', running to £894m, an impairment, at £9m. What, exactly, is that £903m made of, and are there room for savings? From this it's not quite clear.

Non-budget spending is comprised of depreciation, purchase of goods and services, interest payments to the private sector - £175m, which sounds interesting - and £428m of spending marked N/A.Is this waste?

09.45 At Telegraph HQ, GIST is working for some reporters but others are met with a blank screen.

Those who can access it get two portals. OSCAR - or Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting is a Treasury database of spending.

For too long Whitehall has kept taxpayers in the dark about how their cash is spent, so putting more data online is a huge step forward for transparency. What's more, the GIST makes government spending simple to understand, so it is easier for taxpayers to root out waste. After all, power should be in the hands of those who are footing the bills, not those who are spending other people’s money.

MINISTERS want tens of thousands of internet users to help them root out wasteful spending in Whitehall.

The Government has said it will publish all departmental spending on its website in an “easily accessible” format, allowing members of the public to analyse the data.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, in June said that cost-cutting on Government office supplies, advertising and recruitment has saved taxpayers £10 billion.

Ministers said the new online tool, dubbed the Government Interrogating Spending Tool (GIST), will allow members of the public to recommend ways to make further savings.

The data was previously only published in spreadsheet form, which was difficult to interpret and compare across Whitehall departments.

Chloe Smith, a junior minister in the Cabinet Office, said: “The Government will leave no stone unturned when it comes to dealing with the deficit.

“GIST, for the first time, lays open the Government’s books and crucially provides a user-friendly tool with which to analyse the data.”

Stephen Kelly, Chief Operating Officer for Government, said: “Last year we saved £10 billion, but we know that to bring costs down further and achieve the lowest sustainable cost base for government, we need to use data more effectively.

When he announced the £10 billion of Whitehall savings earlier this year, Mr Maude said it equated to almost £600 for every family in the country.

He said that there is “more to come” and said that the Government is “nowhere near the most efficient organisation in the world”.

The £10 billion in annual savings was above the target of £8 billion the Coalition set itself in 2010

09.15 Good morning. Today the Cabinet Office unveils its latest initiative to cut down wasteful spending. GIST - or Government Interrogating Spending Tool - allows the public to see where their taxes go across Government. Ministers say it will make the State more transparent and will drive down the cost of Government.

Are they right? Does GIST shed new light on Government spending? Or is it merely old information in a slick new format? We want you to use the tool and tell us what you find. Email me at matthew.holehouse at telegraph.co.uk or leave your thoughts in the comments below.